During her short life in mid-nineteenth-century Australia, Louisa Atkinson became the first Australian-born woman novelist, a noted naturalist and illustrator, and one of the earliest women journalists of the country. Her novels are among the first works to depict the lives of ordinary men and women who were turning a frontier into a settled society. She became a renowned writer on natural science, contributing a long-running series of nature columns, "A Voice from the Country," to the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Mail . Her botanical finds were praised by the eminent botanist Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, and several plants were named in her honor. Her achievements in writing and in science were made in an age when the usual role of women was almost entirely domestic.

Louisa Atkinson's work as a naturalist and plant collector, and her journalistic writing popularizing the study of native flora and fauna...